Lycidas

“Thyrsis” by Mathew Arnold (1866)

“Thyrsis” is a pastoral elegy by 19th-century English poet Matthew Arnold. It was written to memorialize another English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who had been Arnold’s friend. Clough died in Italy in 1861. The speaker returns to the rural area near Oxford, where he recalls his friendship with Clough, who is referred to as “Thyrsis.” The poem expresses nostalgia and loss, but toward the end, the poet also finds hope that the youthful ideals that inspired both him and Clough have not entirely vanished.

“Adonais” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)

This pastoral elegy by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is a tribute to John Keats, his fellow English poet, who died in Rome, Italy, in February 1821. Keats is memorialized as Adonais, a figure in Greek mythology who was loved by the goddess Venus but was killed by a boar. The link to Keats is that Shelley believed that a hostile review of Keats’s poem Endymion had driven him to an early death. (Shelley makes reference to the reviewer in stanza 37.) The poem follows the conventions of the pastoral elegy, including the invocation of the Muse, the succession of mourners, the fact that the whole of nature participates in mourning, and finally the consolation—the envisioned immortality of the deceased poet.